Legal clock ticking for Dalí museum in Monterey

1of5A woman walks through the Dali17 museum in Monterey, which opened two years ago.Photo: Photos by Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle

2of5Postr of Dali in window of Dali17 Museum in MontereyPhoto: Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle

3of5A man looks at work by Dali inside the Dali17 museum in Monterey, Calif. on July 10, 2018.Photo: Nic Coury, Special to the Chronicle

4of5At Dali17, a couple looks at photographs of Salvador Dalí and friends from a party in 1941 at the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey.Photo: Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle

5of5Lithographs of original gouache paintings at the Dali17 museum.Photo: Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle

MONTEREY — Salvador Dalí, who loved anything that called attention to himself, would surely be overjoyed at what the lawyers have cooked up on his behalf here.

His heart, like his famous clocks, might even be melting.

A Spanish foundation that claims to own the artist’s legacy filed suit in San Francisco to force a small Dalí museum on the Monterey waterfront to stop using Dalí’s name and likeness and to turn over all souvenir Dalí T-shirts, Dalí coloring books and Dalí mustache wax boxes in the gift shop for immediate destruction.

The artist’s most famous painting may be called “The Persistence of Memory,” but apparently that memory must not persist on 100 percent cotton, size XL, for $24.99 plus tax.

“Dalí belongs to everyone,” said Michael Sworaczyk, a visitor from Austin, Texas, who had paid $20 to take a look at hundreds of mostly lithographs inside the two-story museum on the historic plaza. “His art should be seen. He’s one of the greatest artists of all time.”

Dalí, who died in 1989, might have agreed, and also with fellow visitor Lynn Fong of Palo Alto.

“There are so many lawsuits in the world already,” she said, while gazing at a Dalí giraffe that only somewhat resembled a giraffe. “If this guy bought the artworks, doesn’t he have a right to display ’em?”

No, argues the Dalí Foundation of Figueres, Spain. It claims in a 14-page lawsuit filed in federal court on Friday that the museum, which calls itself Dali17, “misappropriated Salvador Dalí’s name and likeness to advertise and promote their museum, and have reproduced and displayed copyrighted artworks.”

Dalí directed the establishment of the foundation six years before his death to protect his work and name, according to the lawsuit.

Exterior of the museum, which was previously a maritime museum with model boats.

Piterman told The Chronicle two years ago that he became obsessed with the painter while a student at UC Berkeley and became a collector of his work.

Piterman, as well as the attorneys representing the Dalí Foundation, declined to comment on the legal dust-up. The suit, according to foundation attorney Noel Cook, speaks for itself.

In it, the foundation claims the museum did not heed warnings that it was violating the law by keeping its doors open. The suit demands that Piterman “deliver up for destruction all products and merchandise” in the museum store.

Also the $15 Dalí coffee mugs that proclaim, most prophetically, “Things are about to get surreal.”

This they are, said the museum’s lone employee, who was selling tickets at the front desk and who declined to give his name because, he said, he likes working in a museum full of melted clocks and giraffes, and wants to keep doing it.

“The lawsuit is way above my pay grade anyway,” he said.

Law experts said the suit appears to be on solid, non-melting legal grounds.

UC Hastings School of Law civil litigation professor David Levine said Piterman “may well have a problem” by using Dalí’s name and image to promote the museum.

T-shirts inside the gift shop of the Dali17 museum feature Salvador Dalí and his famous mustache.

Photo: Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle

And the destruction of all the T-shirts, coffee mugs and geegaws “might well be the remedy” that the foundation is entitled to.

It’s one thing, Levine said, to display a Dalí painting on a museum wall. It’s another thing to use Dalí’s image to promote it.

To be safe, Levine said, Piterman needs a different strategy.

“If he advertises it as ‘Dmitry’s Museum Featuring Works of Salvador Dalí’ without using Dalí’s likeness, that’s probably OK,” Levine said.

And it would help for Dalí to be dead longer than the 29 years he’s been dead, Levine said. He needs to be dead for 60 years. Then Piterman can print up all the Dalí mustache T-shirts he wants.

As an example, the professor said a car dealer can have a George Washington’s birthday car sale and use pictures of Washington, but that the same doesn’t work with 21st century presidents.

“George Washington’s heirs can’t sue,” Levine said. “You’re cool.”

A dozen or so other paying customers were wandering through the gallery on Tuesday, paying particular attention to the exhibits that highlighted the Spanish artist’s connection to Monterey. Dalí came to California in the 1940s, collaborating with such fellow showmen as Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock and throwing a notorious celebrity dinner party at a Monterey hotel that featured an appetizer of live frogs presented to comedian Bob Hope and a main course served in bedroom slippers.

The canvases in the museum are along much the same lines. There are lots of melted clocks, twisted faces, elongated animals, distorted biblical figures and various lesser subtleties.

The original oil painting of “The Persistence of Memory”— Dalí’s iconic image of melted clocks and watches — is on display not at the Monterey gallery but at a slightly larger establishment — the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What Piterman is displaying, along with the image on souvenirs, is an “original lithograph of a reproduction” of the masterpiece.

A sign near the lithograph does explain that the “vision of melting clocks appeared to Dalí after eating Camembert cheese that had turned soft and gooey.”

Museum visitor Dan Pony of New York said that he didn’t know about the Camembert but that a lithograph of a reproduction was “pretty cool” anyway.

“I never expected to see a Dalí museum in Monterey,” he said. “I think it’s great.”

Chronicle staff writer Steve Rubenstein first joined The Chronicle reporting staff in 1976. He has been a metro reporter, a columnist, a reviewer and a feature writer. He left the staff in 2009 to teach elementary school and returned to the staff in 2015. He is married, has a son and a daughter and lives in San Francisco. He is a cyclist and a harmonica player, occasionally at the same time.